Industry or Sector? In English there is a clear distinction between “industry” – a non-countable noun referring to all industrial activities, contrasting for example with “government” – and “an industry”, which is a particular activity. “Government and industry met to discuss the economic crisis.” “The oil industry is trying to publicise its green credential.”

Like walking down the aisle with the price sticker stuck to the sole of your shoe, it can happens to anyone. No matter how careful, experienced or fully bi-lingual you are, from time to time a false friend slips through the net, and you end up translating actuellement as ‘actually’ rather than ‘at the moment’. […]

Did you know that punctuation and even hyphenation rules are somewhat language specific? Here are some of the best-known differences: Quotation marks. These vary quite a lot between languages and merit a blog entry of their own. I almost wrote “inverted commas” instead of “quotation marks”, but that would merely describe the usual English way […]

In Budapest, all of the 24 hour shops advertise themselves as ‘Non-stop’. A Hungarian friend of mine said, in English, something like ‘don’t worry, I’m sure there’ll be a non-stop we can go to’. Apparently in Hungarian these shops are referred to as ‘non-stops’ (using the English words), and, logically enough, my friend assumed this […]